Expand Cut Tags

This is (a first cut at) a sticky-post or landing post for mdlbear.dreamwidth.org. I
intend for it to be edited rather than replaced, so the link should stay
the same.

The Mandelbear

... is what I call the fractal you see in my default icon. The Mandelbear
is infinitely fuzzy, being a two-dimensional cross-section of a
four-dimensional object. It occasionally manifests as an elderly
hacker-songwriter, and sometimes as a Middle-Sized Bear.

Series Tags

This series is a combination of public service announcements, mostly
about security- and privacy-related events, and longer informational
pieces. These posts are cross-posted onto computer-curmudgeon.com.
I'd like to work up to one or two per week.

Posted every Sunday (sometimes delayed or advanced depending on
conventions and where the end of the month falls), this contains my
summary of the week followed by (under a cut tag) the week's worth of
to.do file entries. The format of the to.do entries is
described in How
to.do it, and has been described as sort of an online bullet
journal.

Part 1: Blockchain

Blockchain is the technology behind Bitcoin and other cybercurrencies.
That's about all anyone outside the software industry knows about it; that
and the fact that lots of people are claiming that it's going to transform
everything. (The financial industry, the Web, manufacturing supply chains,
identity, the music industry, ... the list goes on.) If you happen to be
in the software industry and have a moderately good idea of what
blockchain is, how it works, and what it can and can't do, you
may want to skip to Part 2.

Still with me? Here's the fifty-cent summary of blockchain. Blockchain
is a distributed, immutable ledger. Buzzword is a buzzword buzzword
buzzword? Blockchain is a chain of blocks? That's closer.

The purpose of a blockchain is to keep track of financial transactions
(that's the "ledger" part) and other data by making them public (that's
half of the "distributed" part), keeping them in blocks of data (that's
the "block" part) that can't be changed (that's the "immutable" part, and
it's a really good property for a ledger to have), are linked together by
hashes (that's the "chain" part, and we'll get to what hashes are in a
moment), with the integrity of that chain guaranteed by a large group of
people (that's the other half of the "distributed" part) called "miners"
(WTF?).

Let's start in the middle: how can we link blocks of data together so
that they can't be changed? Let's start by making it so that any change
to a block, or to the order of those blocks, can be detected. Then, the
fact that everything is public makes the data impossible to change without
that change being glaringly obvious. We do that with hashes.

A hash function is something that takes a large block of data and turns it
into a very long sequence of bits (which we will sometimes refer to as a
"number", because any whole number can be represented by a sequence of
binary digits, and sometimes as a "hash", because the data has been
chopped up and mashed together like the corned beef hash you had for
breakfast). A good hash function has two important properties:

It's irreversible. Starting with a hash, it is effectively impossible to
construct a block of data that will produce that hash. (It is
significantly easier to construct two blocks with the same hash, which
is why the security-conscious world moves to larger hashes from time to
time.)

It's unpredictable. If two blocks of data differ anywhere, even by a
single bit, their hashes will be completely different.

Those two together mean that if two blocks have the same hash, they
contain the same data. If somebody sends you a block and a
hash, you can compare the hash of the block and if it matches, you can be
certain that the block hasn't been damaged or tampered with before it got
to you. And if they also cryptographically sign that hash, you
can be certain that they used the key that created that signature.

Now let's guarantee the integrity of the sequence of blocks by
chaining them together. Every block in the chain contains the hash of the
previous block. If block B follows block A in the chain, B's hash depends
in part on the hash of block A. If a villain tries to insert a forged
transaction into block A, its hash won't match the one in block B.

Now we get to the part that makes blockchain interesting: getting
everyone to agree on which transactions go into the next block. This is
done by publishing transactions where all of the miners can see
them. The miners then get to work with shovels and pickaxesbig fast computers, validating the transaction, putting it into
a block, and then running a contest to see which of them gets to add their
block to the chain and collect the associated reward. Winning the contest
requires doing a lot of computation. It's been estimated that
miners' computers collectively consume roughly the same amount of
electricity as Ireland.

There's more to it, but that's blockchain in a nutshell. I am
not going to say anything about what blockchain might be good for
besides keeping track of virtual money -- that's a whole other rabbit hole
that I'll save for another time. For now, the important thing is that
blockchain is a system for keeping track of financial transactions by
using a chain of blocks connected by hashes.

The need for miners to do work is what makes the virtual money they're mining
valuable, and makes it possible for everyone to agree on who owns how much
of it without anyone having to trust anyone else. It's all that work that
makes it possible to detect cheating. It also makes it expensive and
slow. The Ethereum blockchain can handle about ten transactions per
second. Visa handles about 10,000.

The other blockchain

Meanwhile, in another part of cyberspace, software developers are using
another system based on hash chains to keep track of their software -- a
distributed version control system called git. It's almost
completely different, except for the way it uses hashes. How different?
Well, for starters it's both free and fast, and you can use it at home.
And it has nothing to do with money -- it's a version control system.

If you've been with me for a while, you've probably figured out that I'm
extremely fond of git. This post is not an introduction to git
for non-programmers -- I'm working on that. However, if you managed to
get this far it does contain enough information to stand on its own,

Git doesn't use transactions and blocks; instead it uses "objects", but
just like blocks each object is identified by its hash. Instead of
keeping track of virtual money, it keeps track of files and their
histories. And just as blockchain keeps a complete history of everyone's
coins, git records the complete history of everyone's data.

Git uses several types of object, but the most fundamental one is called a
"blob", and consists of a file, its size, and the word "blob". For
example, here's how git idenifies one of my Songs for Saturday posts:

Everything you do with git starts with the git command. In
this case we're using git hash-object and giving it the
pathname of the file we want to hash. Hardly anyone needs to use the
hash-object subcommand; it's used mainly for testing and the
occasional demonstration.

Git handles a directory (you may know directories as "folders" if
you aren't a programmer) by combining the names, metadata, and hashes of
all of its contents into a type of object called a "tree", and taking the
hash of the whole thing.

Here, by the way, is another place where git really differs from blockchain.
In a blockchain, all the effort of mining goes into making sure that every
block points to its one guaranteed-unique correct predecessor. In other
words, the blocks form a chain. Files and directories form a tree, with
the ordinary files as the leaves, and directories as branches. The
directory at the top is called the root. Top? Top. For some
reason software trees grow from the root down. After a while you get used
to it.

Actually, that's not quite accurate, because git stores each object in
exactly one place, and it's perfectly possible for the same file to be in
two different directories. This can be very useful -- if you
make a hundred copies of a file, git only has to store one of them. It's
also inaccurate because trees, called Merkle Trees are
used inside of blocks in a blockchain. But I digress.

And that brings us to the things that make git, git: commits. ("Commit"
is used in the same sense, more or less, as it is in the phrase "commit
something to memory", or "commit to a plan of action". It has very little
to do with crime. Hashes are even more unique than fingerprints, and we
all know what criminals think about fingerprints. In cryptography, the
hash of a key is called its fingerprint.)

Anyway, when you're done making changes in a project, you type the command

git commit

... and git will make a new commit object which contains, among other
things, the time and date, your name and email address, maybe your
cryptographic signature, a brief description of what you did (git puts you
into your favorite text editor so you can enter this if you didn't put it
on the command line), the hash of the current root, and the hash of
the previous commit. Just like a blockchain.

Unlike earlier version control systems, git never has to compare files;
all it has to do is compare their hashes. This is fast -- git's
hashes are only 20 bytes long, no matter how big the files are or how many
are in a directory tree. And if the hashes of two trees are the
same, git doesn't have to look at any of the blobs in those trees to know
that they are all the same.

Not a whole lot has been getting done this week. I did manage to run some
errands Thursday and Friday, with the car on the street. Pulled back into
the driveway Friday after things were done, anticipating that the
predicted good weather would make it possible to get up again the next
time I need to. Fingers crossed.

I started working on the potential writing (tutorials) gig -- we'll see
whether $editor likes my proposal. Not many notes Friday and Saturday as a
result. Not sure I'm working fast enough. That remains to be seen; it's
going slower than I'd like but that may just be because I'm working on the
outline.

So, it's been a (mostly snowbound) week. It started snowing last Sunday
morning; by Monday we had five inches and the streets were impassable.
Tuesday I drove down the driveway because C had a Wednesday appointment
and I needed to get the car charged; Wednesday we had to cancel because I
couldn't get up the driveway. Good thing, because if I had Colleen and I
would probably have gotten stuck at the bottom of some hill.

I was able to get out Thursday and shop for staples (and L's
drugs). I had very sensibly parked on the street again. Apparently it
takes two or three days for the crews to plow and sand the streets to the
point where a two-wheel drive car can use them. C cancelled her Friday
appointment just a few minutes before they would have called her.
We have seven or eight inches total right now, with more on the way
tonight, Monday, and Tuesday.

I've been less productive than I'd like for FAWM, but not entirely idle. I got my second song out
on time, and then got totally stuck trying to come up with either a
follower to that one, or something about my father. Total
blank. I guess, in retrospect, that getting derailed was not really
surprising, but those songs really want to get written. I was
rescued yesterday by a collaboration with pocketnaomi, and it did
involve a truck, but I'm still behind.

I am falling behind in FAWM -- it's the 9th, and as of this afternoon I
had only two songs up. Now, thanks to a collaboration with pocketnaomi, I have three (which is still behind, only not as much).

Today's s4s is Weird Load,
and it was a heck of a lot of fun. N had the initial idea, and wrote the
chorus (including the melody). I filled in the verses, and N posted it
after some edits. Then I consed up the verse melody (which is almost the
same as the chorus). It continues my short string of truck songs,
although it's not connected at all to the other two.

It's the anticipated follow-on to "Twenty-First Century Breakup Song". I'm very unhappy with the audio
of the first two verses; it's still very unstable and was even more so
when I made the recording.

As the liner notes say, as soon as I'd written "Twenty-First Century
Breakup Song", it was clear that I had to write the other part of the
story. The only question was whose point of view to use, and that
answered itself with the first line.

(Just as an aside, it's really hard to type with a warm, cuddly cat in
one's lap. Should I write a song about you, Desti?)

It's been suggested (see comments on the song page) that this could turn
into a theme album. I'm not sure I can sustain it for a full month, but
there's certainly enough material in this story for an EP. *rubs hands
together gleefully*

Good grief! Got so wrapped in songwriting -- or is that FAWMwriting -- that I didn't
notice it was Sunday. I will attempt to rectify that error.

I managed to start FAWM (February Album-Writing Month, in case you missed
the announcements) pretty well; the silly thing's been well
received, I think. You can also see the lyrics on yesterday's Songs for
Saturday, but you'll have to click through to FAWM if you want the
audio. Which is not too bad for something that was slapped together in
under an hour. It's only the one song so far, we'll see whether I can
make a second song come together by tomorrow night.

It's still snowing here on Whidbey; we're well on our way to getting the
predicted 3-4 inches. I am not crazy about driving in snow, but I can do
it when I have to. I parked on the street this evening; I don't know what
the driveway is going to be like after the slush freezes, but I don't
really want to know.

The most useful links this week are probably the ones on Monday about Data Privacy
Day.

By the end of yesterday I'd squeezed out a four line verse and what looked
like three lines of a chorus. The chorus actually made it all the way
into the final song, having acquired two more lines. It took me a most of
today to make the verses work, but when I got the last verse to come
together I knew it was going to work.

The melody came together in less than an hour. That often happens; I tend
to start hearing bits of it in my head while I'm writing. D is an easy
key to play, and generally a good one for me to sing in.

I'm going to use the fact that Bandcamp (started in 2008) didn't exist
when I released the album (2007) as an excuse for not having done this
sooner. I know, pretty lame. But joining a site that asks for a Bandcamp
link if you have one makes as good a reason as any.

I should also add that it's still available on CD Baby Music Store, which also has
actual, physical CDs to sell you.

This is coming out on a Monday rather than Sunday because I spent the
weekend at Conflikt, our local filk
music convention. I'm usually too lazy to do a formal con report, and
this lets me collect all the notes in one place that's easy to find
.

Meta: rather than create tags like conflikt-2019, I
use the two tags conflikt and 2019.
This only works if the year tag is only used for events that
occur annually. Using the same tag for every post in a year would be
pretty useless. DW doesn't appear to give you boolean searches, but I can
do it in my archive.

I didn't have a concert slot this year, and didn't feel up to a twofer, so
my own music-making was confined to a little noodling in the hallways and
a couple of songs on Sunday. One of those was following Frank Hayes's
"When I Was a Boy" with my parody of it; that was a major win. Ad-libbed a reference to
RFC-1149, and "talk about spaghetti code" after the line about
plugboards. But, yeah; not enough singing. Not enough conversation,
either.

I think my favorite concert was Lauren Cox's Interfilk Guest concert; her
song about her cat made me tear up a little. That, and her joining Cat
Faber on "I Will Remember" (about depression) on Sunday.

I got in my request for a concert slot next year; we'll see how far that
goes.

The week also included a total lunar eclipse -- I didn't stay outside for the whole thing, but
got a good look just at the start of totality.

How it works: reply with "Oh! Shiny" and I'll choose three of your
icons. Tell me about them: where they came from, what they mean to you,
and/or when you deploy them. Drop a link here to your post in your own
journal. Spread it around.

(Not sure how long it will take me, if there's a deluge of responses.)

A stylized, multicolor line drawing of a propeller beanie. The outlined
gores are colored (left to right) red, purple, and blue; there are white
spaces between them. The propeller is a green infinity sign.

I got this from lysana; it looks like
it was made by her artist husband blackfyr. It has fallen out of use recently; I used it 26
times, between 2004 and 2011, for posts about science fiction fandom or
conventions.

The icon isn't completely accurate; Science
fiction fandom as we know it today dates back only to 1929. Philo
Farnsworth demonstrated the first electronic television, using his image dissector
tube, in 1928, and mechanical versions existed before then. Television
broadcasting, however, only started in the late 1930s.

"hacker traveling"

The background is a 3x3 grid of black lines on a white background; five
black circles make a "glider", instantly familiar to anyone who knows
about Conway's Game of Life. Against this background a picture of an old
guy in a tweed cap moves counter-clockwise in a circle centered somewhere in the
lower right-hand corner.

This icon was made by snobahr, in
2007; the moving image came from the cover of my CD, Coffee, Computers and Song, which was in production at
the time. It was first used in this post, the
second of two posts from OSCon 2007. It was used a total of 30 times in
2007 and 2008, once in 2009, and once in 2012, mostly for posts about
software-related conventions.

Consonance
On a purple background, the word "CONSONANCE", in black. The letters are compressed
toward the top, and the two "N"'s are the support towers of the Golden
Gate Bridge.

This is the logo of Consonance - The
SF Bay Area Filk Convention. Colleen and I attended all of them until
2012, when we moved to Seattle, and a few after that; our last one was in
2015. This icon appears to have been used only once, in this post,
live-blogged from the Interfilk concert.

I'm still not getting as much real work done as I need to, so I'm still
down on myself as usual, but I've gotten a few, mostly less important,
things done.

I actually did a little hacking this week: we wanted to put the music
collection onto an mp3 player for m, so I had to transcode the existing
collection, most of which is in ogg vorbis. I realized that I could
shrink them considerably in the process, which got all the folk and filk
in under 20GB. The whole thing will almost certainly come in under 64GB,
and micro SD cards that size are getting cheap. There was a moderate
amount of bash scripting involved. There will be even more next time; the
server is about a quarter the speed of my fastest laptop.

I seem to be the official household recipient for dead or dubious
electronics. It's not that I'm necessarily capable of fixing it, just
that I'm the only one who might consider it worth attempting.
Not that I actually do attempt it in all cases; that's why I also
maintain the household's collection of dead phones and tablets. However,
I've gotten pretty good at simple laptop repair and linux installs.

There will be a total lunar eclipse tomorrow night. The entire eclipse
will be visible from anywhere in the Americas and Europe. Here on Whidbey
Island, the eclipse starts at 7:33pm and ends at 10:50pm; totality runs
from 8:41 to 9:43pm. This is going to be a glorious eclipse.
According to Astronomy Picture of
the Day, the next total lunar eclipse visible from anywhere on the
planet will be on May 26, 2021, and will last 15 minutes.

If your password shows up in Pwned Passwords, stop
using it. Consider enabling two-factor authentication where you can, and
getting a password vault. Hunt recommends 1Password. If you want open source,
you can try KeePassX.

I'm not sure where this week went. It doesn't feel as though I did very
much. (And looking over the notes, that seems fairly accurate.) As
usual.

I got a little more done than usual about the yard (which is a disaster)
and the garage (likewise). However, since "usual" is nothing at all,
that's not saying much. And since "usual" has been going on for over a
year...

I'm not finding a lot to say about this week, so I think I'll stop here.
There are some good links about privacy under the cut; probably the most
generally useful is How to Set Up Your Devices for Privacy Protection from
DuckDuckGo.com, which is a search engine that doesn't track you, and which
I also recommend.

Markdown is a popular plain-text markup language that strongly resembles
the conventions of email. In fact, posting by email has used markdown for
a long time; you can now use it for posting by using the HTML editor and
starting your post with !markdown. It also works if you're
using a client that takes raw HTML, such as charm or
MakeStuff. See Jesse's post for the cheat-sheet, or go to
the official spec, at https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax. Note that most
GitHub extensions, e.g. code fencing with triple backticks, are
not supported. At least, not yet. There is one DW-specific
extension: @username expands to a standard user link, e.g. mdlbear.

I'm still not getting much done. The week between Christmas and New Year
felt like a vacation, but getting back to work afterwards? Not so much.
this article may explain some of that. Though I can't escape the
feeling that I'm simply lazy. I've noticed a tendency to get annoyed when
Colleen nags me to do something that I've been putting off for too long; I
think a large part of that is that these are things that I beat myself up
over every damned day.

Most of my current problems are self-inflicted. The few that aren't, I've
simply made worse by neglecting them. I don't like myself very much this
morning. This week.

On the plus side, Colleen and I celebrated our 43rd anniversary with
dinner at Toby's on Friday. And I made a wooden guide to replace the
totally inadequate L-hook holding the cat lock in place. And I did a
small amount of writing, and an even smaller but still non-zero amount of
programming. So there's that.

Back-story - the song

I first heard "Welcome to Acousticville" the one time I heard Janis
perform live, at a little Mexican restaurant called Don Quixote in Felton,
CA. (You might want to look at my post, though it
doesn't say very much.) "Welcome to Acousticville" was one of my two
favorite songs from that concert; the other was "The Last Train"
(lyrics.
I've sung that one quite a few times, though not recently. Never had the guts
to try "Welcome to Acousticville".

Janis Ian is a science fiction fan; I find it interesting but not
surprising that my two favorite songs of hers are fantasy; neither would
be out of place at a filksing.

Back-story - the icon

The rose icon started out as a gif that somebody posted on Usenet; I took
out the background and adjusted the color balance until it looked right.
I created it in 1990, in honor of my daughter Amethyst Rose. I first used
it as an icon on LJ in 2003; it appears to have been the second icon I
uploaded, after the fractal that I still use as a default.

Since then, I've been using it as my standard icon not only for the Amethyst Rose
posts, but for most posts and comments about grieving. Most people use a
candle.

This morning Colleen turned to me and said something to the effect of
"It's our anniversary. Forty-three years and we ain't killed each other
yet." She added that "it's been close a couple of times", and I can't
argue with that.

It occurred to me about an hour ago that it's probably not surprising that
I feel like I'm under stress. Some of the most stressful events are
supposed to be things like losing a job, retiring, and moving. In the
last six and a half years I've:

Moved five times.

Been involved in three remodeling projects.

Been laid off twice.

Sold a house twice. (In both cases for a great deal less than expected.)

Bought a house twice.

Lost a (feline) family member.

Totaled a car.

Retired.

Started job-hunting again.

Not to mention other household members with life-threatening health
problems. (Mine were just painful as heck -- multiple torn muscles and a
broken nose.)

At this point I could punt and simply carry all of last year's goals
forward. Most of them -- Worldcon in San Jose is past its use-by date.
But several of last year's goals were carried over from 2017. What makes
me think I'd do any better this year? My biggest problem is still
procrastination. It would be easy to blame it on depression or burnout
but let's face it, those are largely effects rather than causes.

And many new challenges came in from the family health crisis that we
couldn't possibly have forseen. Not my story to tell, but the drain on
the household finances and on everyone's time and energy is huge.

Okay, then. The number one goal is simply getting through the
damned year, alive and with one or more roofs over our heads.
Yeah, I know -- the problems aren't all my fault. Only most
of them. That doesn't keep me from feeling responsible.

There are two bucket-list events coming up; the first is my 50th
college reunion. I don't want a repeat of the my high school reunion
debacle. I'm going.

The second is Mom's 99th birthday celebration.

There's a lot of yard work that needs to get done in order to make the
apartment over the garage attractive as a vacation rental. Weeding,
mowing, and fixing the driveway are the high-order bits.

There's also a huge amount of paperwork associated with setting up a
vacation rental as well -- business license, tax stuff, all that. Not
to mention putting (some fraction of) the associated remodeling on our
taxes. Lots of figuring-out to do. Just the sort of thing I hate.

I have to either get a job (which is unlikely and largely out of my
control, but I have to at least crank out the applications) or start a
business.

I have to put in an amended tax return for 2017; that means finding the
rest of the receipts for work done on the house. Mostly that's yard,
deck, bathroom, studio, and the stairlifts.

Having just found out that my posting software hasn't been passing the
Music: header up to DW, I'm putting writing a good command-line DW
client on the list. Most likely written in Perl, Python, or Go.
Of course, it needs to be able to upload as well as post, in order to
backfill the music.

Speaking of music, we're working toward a concert at Conflikt in 2020.
That means not only picking our setlist and rehearsing the heck out of
it, but having CDs to sell. This is a huge stretch --
recording new CDs has been on my to-do list for over a decade now
(CC&S came out in 2007).

And then there's writing. No particular target, but definitely
more curmudgeon and s4s posts.

It looks as though I've been posting about every other day most months,
and nearly every day in November. Not sure what happened in February
through April -- those were little more than the done posts. Okay,
that wasn't really very encouraging.

I'm not really up to writing a narrative summary of the year. I prefer
stories with happy endings and, preferably, not too much bad stuff getting
there. I also hate cliffhangers, and this year certainly counts
in that category.

It's been a week. Again. It was lovely having the entire household
together for Christmas; We had roast beast and Yorkshire pudding. Instead
of cooking the pudding under the roast I poured out the fat into muffin
tins, then roasted a batch of Brussels sprouts and potatoes in the pan
with the remaining drippings. Worked well -- I'm going to remember that.

For the last several months I've been scared about my budget shortfall.
Yesterday I found a mistake in my spreadsheet that brought it down from
nearly $2K to just under $600. Still problematic, and there's enough
uncertainty that it could easily go higher. But...

siderea's post: The
Vimes Boots Theory: Further Reflections applies here. I may be able
to break even on a day-to-day basis, but I'm all out of savings, and some
things are going to require money up front, including everything I need to
make the apartment into something that we can use as a vacation rental.
And if anything happens... there's no slack at all.

Speaking of slack, I spend too much time on social media. And yet, here I
am. At least I've mostly dumped FB except for the occasional email
notification that looks interesting enough to follow up. I stopped
reading Twitter last year. Or the year before. I don't miss it.

I have a bad habit of letting things go until it's too late to do anything
about them. Usually I end up regretting the missed opportunity, and too
often for comfort it ends up being a disaster. See trainwreck.

The lyrics are taken, more or less directly, from the writings of Julian of
Norwich, who lived in what historian Barbara Tuchman called "The Calamitous 14th
Century". Hope was in even shorter supply back then: the page in
Wikipedia about the book lists ...the Hundred Years' War, the Black
Plague, the Papal Schism, pillaging mercenaries, anti-Semitism, popular
revolts including the Jacquerie in France, the liberation of Switzerland,
the Battle of the Golden Spurs, and peasant uprisings. Not to mention
the advance of the Islamic Ottoman Empire into Europe, ending in the
disastrous Battle of Nicopolis.

The relevant quote from Julian's writing is

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

That comes through in the song's chorus as

Ring out! Bells of Norwich, and
let the winter come and go.
All shall be well again, I know.

Last night around 11pm I was awakened by an alert on my phone telling me
that 911 service was down, and giving me an alternat number to call. By
morning, it was clear that it wasn't a local problem. A quick search
showed that the problem was caused by CenturyLink, which tweeted, blaming it on aa network element that was impacting
customer services and saying that they estimated it would be fixed in
about four hours.

It was more like twelve here on Whidbey Island, and some parts of the
country are still (as of 2pm) offline, according to Outage.Report. The FCC
is investigating.

If you live in Washington, king5.com has a handy list of numbers to call, by county. (The news
article also has auto-playing video - you may want to mute your speakers.)

Feeling scared and not particularly grateful this week; we'll have to see
what I come up with.

I got some nice presents on Christmas. You know who you are. Many
thanks.

Colleen, who somehow manages to put up with me.

I'm really grateful to my Mom, who has been providing some
financial assistance (out of my inheritance). I'm not the first one in
the family she's helped -- both my kids and my nephew have benefited
from her generosity.

I'm no-end grateful to my sister N, who came up from Seattle to visit
for nearly two weeks. (Does it count as a visit if this is her real
home and she's only living in Seattle temporarily because Reasons?
Whatever; I'll take it.)

Cat cuddles. We have excellent cats.

Grandmother in the Kitchen -- I don't know how long
Colleen has had that cookbook, but we've gotten a lot of good use out
of it, Especially the Yorkshire pudding recipe.

... and I guess, since this is the last Thankful Thursday of 2018,
I ought to be grateful to have survived it.

Whidbey Island has wind storms. Last week was punctuated by a pair of
power outages: one from 12:40am to 3:30pm Monday, and one from 11am
Thursday to 10:55 Friday. I was actually surprised that they got the
power up as fast as they did Friday; I was expecting another day's worth.
I never did get a good look at the eventual outage map.

In the first outage, I learned that my bedroom UPS will keep my CPAP
running for about three hours. It would be significantly more without the
huidifier, but there doesn't seem to be a way of turning it off remotely;
next time I'll try to remember to take it off if the UPS alarm wakes me up
(as it did this time). The IT UPS (in the entryway/laundry room) kept the
routers up for about ten, even without shutting down the server, which is
probably the biggest power draw.

In the second one, I learned that:

Phone service is spotty to nonexistant during a sufficiently long
outage. (My phone's hotspot went away just as I was trying to post Thankful
Thursday.)

I can sleep without a CPAP if I have to. (Actually I knew that
already, but recent confirmation is nice.)

We don't have water during an outage because the well has an electric
pump with no backup generator. Water stayed up long enough for me to
fill a couple of gallon bottles, though.

We didn't have nearly enough water available for flushing the toilets.

Molly, our electric car, can be used to charge phones and other
electronics. (On the other hand, we don't have a way to keep
her charged; that would have been problematic in a longer
outage.) Her WiFi hotspot can be used to network a couple of laptops
together even if it can't get to the internet. I like Molly.

Although I'm positive we have a hardwired phone someplace in the house
or the garage, I have no idea where it went.

We did have enough flashlights and LED lanterns to go around, but we
probably don't have enough batteries for a longer outage.

N has been up from Seattle for the entire week -- that's been
wonderful. (The kids are with their father because their cousins are in
town.) She's been staying in the Box Barn (as we've started calling the
apartment over the garage). It has hot water, finally; the only thing
left to do is some electrical work; that's scheduled for the first week in
January.

I'm continuing to have problems configuring a WiFi repeater to cover the
Box Barn. You would think that it would be easy to configure a dual-band
router as a bridge -- you'd be wrong. Apparently there are some problems
with the WiFi protocol and DHCP that make this difficult. It would be
easier if it wasn't so easy to break the configuration to the point where
it becomes inaccessible and I have to do a hard reset.

I've also learned that my recording and cd-burning toolchain has serious
problems, which is not at all surprising. It hasn't been used for
years, so the whole transition to MakeStuff has sort of
passed it by. I finally have most of it working; it's enough to put
together and burn a CD. The parts for publishing concerts on the web
mostly aren't working; I've fallen far behind in that department.

In 1985 I wrote a song called: "The World Inside the
Crystal". At the time there didn't seem to be any songs about
computers, or programming, that weren't meant to be funny. (I think there
might have been a few about AI or robots that were meant to be scary.
It's entirely possible that this was the first serious computer
song ever written.)

I also wanted to explore the notion that inside of computers is an
alternate universe where magic works. I don't remember whether I came up
with that, or somebody else mentioned it to me; it was definitely an idea
that I was kicking around at that time. Kick it far enough, and it winds
up someplace like this:

Beside the world we live in
Apart from day and night
Is a world ablaze with wonder
Of magic and delight
Like a magic crystal mirror,
My computer lets me know
Of the other world within it
Where my body cannot go.
chorus:
You can only see the shadows
Of electrons on a screen
From the world inside the crystal
That no human eye has seen.
The computer is a gateway
To a world where magic rules
Where the only law is logic
Webs of words the only tools
Where we play with words and symbols
And creation is the game
For our symbols have the power
To become the things they name.
chorus
Now you who do not know this world
Its dangers or its joys
You take the things we build there
And you use them as your toys.
You trust them with your fortunes,
Or let them guard your lives.
From the chaos of creation
Just their final form survives.
chorus
Call us hackers, call us wizards,
With derision or respect,
Still our souls are marked by something
That your labels can't affect.
Though our words are touched by strangeness
There is little we can say.
You would only hear the echo
Of a music far away.
chorus

I can always tell the programmers in the audience -- they've been there.
It won a Pegasus Award for "Best Science Song" in 1997, possibly because I
mentioned it on Usenet.

There are several different recordings. The one to start with is Kathy
Mar's cover here,
off of her tape Plus &csedilla;a Change, with an awesome
synth track by Chrys Thorsen. The one on my CD is okay, although I'm not
all that happy with it now. It's way too fast, for one thing, and there
isn't an instrumental break before the last verse. It's on YouTube
courtesy of my distributor, CD Baby.

There have been some good ones in concerts. The one at Consonance
2009, with Tres Gique, is one of the better ones. Here's another, at
Baycon
2009. Consonance 2012 appears to be my best (recorded) solo performance.
Audio players don't come off all that well on DW, but I'll close with one anyway.

Your browser doesn't seem to support the Audio tag, which is very retro
of it.

An interesting week. Parts of it were good. The high point was
definitely my Younger Daughter's wedding on Thursday. Another good part
was N coming up to visit Friday, to stay through Christmas. I gave her
one of my (in)famous cutting boards -- she'd asked for it. She'd also
requested a copy of my music collection. It fits on a (128GB) thumb
drive, but we both then forgot about it. I'll have to mail it.

Also on the good side was Desti's vet appointment to get her sutures out;
the vet said she's healing well.

A somewhat mixed part was figuring out how to copy a long-out-of-print LP
onto disk. For some reason "line out" on the player wasn't working;
fortunately the headphone jack was. Mixed, because I then discovered that
my CD-burning scripts were long out of date and suffering from severe
bit-rot. I will probably make CDs via the GUI and fix the scripts later.

Also in between was a little singing (good) and not enough blog posts (not
so good). Blarg.

The low point was probably having my last singing lesson on Tuesday night
-- I just can't justify the cost at this point. It had some competition
from a wide range of configuration struggles with the local network and
its devices. Struggles are still continuing -- I ended up having to
hard-reset the router I've been using as a range extender. It turns out
that range-extending WiFi is an insufficiently-solved Problem.

Other lows included a couple of depressed episodes. I think. It' hard
for me to sort that stuff out.

Following up on mdlbear | Welcome, tumblr refugees: this might otherwise have just
been a longish section of next Sunday's "done" post, but the Tumblr
apocalypse (tumbling-down?) is happening now and I wanted to get
tumblr_backup.py out there.
(It's a tumblr backup script, via this tumblr post by greywash, who notes that the original post by
Greymask has disappeared). I think some of my readers will find it
useful.

a remark by apricops: "It’s quite likely no... coincidence that that most
‘mismanaged’ and least profitable social media site is also the one that
turned out to be most amenable to the formation of actual communities"

I guess not a bad week. Not a good one, I don't think. Just a week. But
we have our internet connection back, I spent some time down at the south
end of the household, and I have the YD's wedding present (one of my
famous cutting boards) mostly made. Not as good a finish as I like,
because I couldn't find most of my planes (they turned up today, so I may
be able to do some fixing) and had to make do with the sander. The beauty
of the wood may make up for the slight irregularity of the surface.

One bit of good news: I heard from the vet about the histology report on
the cysts removed from Desti last week -- they were benign, and were
completely excised. So she's going to be okay. She's getting her sutures
removed tomorrow.

Elsenet, Tumblr gave me a great excuse for a metapost. There's nothing wrong with event-driven scheduling, is there?

Not much programming -- just filling in some gaps in word-count -- and no writing beyond what's here in the blog. I think
I'm supposed to feel accomplished because of what I did get done,
but I know that I'm losing ground.

The thing I love about this song (aside from a melody that lends itself
perfectly to my picking style) is the vast sweep of history it implies.
Earth has been lost in the depths of time, and become a legend. Humanity
has spread throughout the galaxy -- the "wheel of light" -- living in fusion-powered
starships (you can tell that from the "blue, glowing wings" that sweep
up interstellar hydrogen to burn). All that's left of Earth is the song
and the story it tells.

A few years back (I don't remember how many) after reading Norman
Spinrad's novel Riding the Torch, Don confirmed my guess that that had
been his inspiration.

One's first impression, hearing the song, is that it's set a few thousand
years in the future, but that would be way too short a time. It's been
long enough for humans to have spread throughout the Milky Way,
which is some 200,000 light-years across, and to have evolved (or more
likely engineered themselves) into many different sub-species. It's as if
the story had been passed down to us from the Late Paleolithic;
about the time of the earliest known bone flutes.

As I say on the lyrics
page on my website, "If one of the songs we're singing now is still
being sung a thousand years from now, it will probably be this one." Next
time it comes up for a Pegasus, please vote for it.

I don't really expect that many Tumblr refugees will see this post, even
with the tag, but I know there's at least one person already on my reading
list who cross-posts from there, so there may be a few. There may be some
G+ refugees, too. In reality, all I'm doing is taking advantage of the
occasion to post a few links. Hopefully more than just a handful of my
readers will find them interesting.

... and my own post from the (most recent) LJ exodus, PSA: LJBF:
Goodbye's too good a word.... (I note that I still haven't carried
out the full plan there -- I'm still cross-posting. I'll probably
continue to, since there are still some people who only have accounts
there. I'm sure the same thing will happen with Tumblr.)

Let's start with jesse_the_k's post, Remember when
Fandom Spec'ed Pinboard?. Well, no, I don't -- I wasn't using Delicious at
the time. But apparently a lot of fans were, so when the site's owners
(Yahoo) made some "improvements" like disallowing several punctuation
characters in tags (in particular, "/" -- just try tagging fanfic without
slash), there was a mass exodus to Pinboard.